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A Quickly Made Turnip Soup

A soup made from turnips, stock, sugar, salt, white pepper, optional onion and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Quickly Made Turnip Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the turnips and stock in a pot and stew gently for 25 to 30 minutes until the turnips reduce to pulp.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve into a clean pot.

  3. Add another quart of stock, sugar, salt, and white pepper; bring to a boil for 2 to 3 minutes.

  4. Skim off any foam and serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Veal + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Turnip + white peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together275 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Break down into pulp to give the soup its body and thickness.
Stock
Provides the liquid base and savory flavor for the soup.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the turnip's natural bitterness.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Turnips must be stewed until fully soft, then pressed through a sieve; any remaining fibers or lumps will leave the soup coarse rather than smooth.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, veal, sugar, white pepper, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, veal, sugar, white pepper, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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